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There was an interesting article at www.linux.com recently on setting up a media center on a network using ununtu:
http://www.linux.com/article.pl?sid=06/01/04/1855257
looks like it would be fun to try. I didn't know they made pc's specifically for the purpose though.. anyone try one of those?
well, there's a reason XP Media Centre Edition exists ;)
just some random musings below
i'd say the best option would be to either use a minimalist distro (gentoo, slackware etc) or even to build a Linux From Scratch. Why? well, you could build it to focus on media apps without any added bloat. (hopefully). imo, KDE would be the best DE because of amaroK and Kaffiene (which, with the right codecs, is quite excellent). just don't use juK, because it's slow as hell to change songs. if you were going to setup a network you'd probably be best off using a fileserver so other PCs can access it.
to answer anyone who wonders what i mean by bloat, i mean stuff like web browsers, games, office software etc. imo, it's easier to install gentoo, only adding stuff as you need it rather than to spend hours just unticking boxes in a SuSE install or uninstalling stuff after the distro is installed. more time consuming, but at least you know you didn't miss anything.
So far I have used Geexbox for my home media centre and haven't got anything to complain about. As for bloated systems, for most of the systems that I have installed, you do have choices fo what packages you install if you do a custom one. You just have to have an idea. The other option, which I am going to be doin soon with frugleware, is uninstalling that which I don't need.
http://linuxtoys.net/ these books have some neat projects on that stuff as well.
i am looking very closely at this topic. i am interested in linux media centre pcs.
i understand the hardware req's, and installing a minimalist distro (like gentoo), but i dont understand what you would do from then on.
also ive heard of mythtv, but what is it, is it linux based, how does it work and where can i find the downalods for it and/or isos?
thanks
weed
Mythtv isn't one I have played with as of yet, but I watched a webcast by Kevin Rose about knopmyth. Take a look at it http://www.mysettopbox.tv/knoppmyth.html and the cast i watched can be found http://revision3.com/systm/mythtv/
enjoy
Hi guys,
I've got a friend who is WAAAYYYY into this...divxs and all that stuff....he's tweaked windoze until it doesn't have a nose left and is tired of it and we WERE going to setup Xandros on a nice media box last week and didn't....now.... I'm a BIG Xandros fan.....but he has fiddled with Ubuntu a little and I was quite intrigued by the Atomic Linux....so, even though it won't be Xandros .....I'm going to point him at these two articles to consider first.....
thanks again...
ain't xandros great!
woodsmoke
I've been looking into this a little more lately, and am getting ready to setup a box myself, probably with mythTV. My dad asked me though if there is anyway he could setup a machine to record tv programs on a regular schedule, but to only save the audio stream.. I looked around on the web some, and it doesn't seem like MythTV has any easy way to get just the audio streams from a tv program.
Anyone know of any programs that might be able to do this?
One possible way i thought of would be to check the software that came with his sound card and to see if that can record audio streams from a tv input.. in that case i could possibly right a bash script to have it record at certain times, but not sure how well that would work either.